Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Here's a question I've been wondering about recently: How adversely does haste affect your survival from additional parry hastes? Basically with all the haste on my new TOC gear I'm wondering if expertise just becomes even more important as a mitigation stat.

One of the very first posts I ever wrote on this blog was about expertise and survival. It's interesting to go back and read that too. The conclusions are sound (stack expertise over avoidance) but it somewhat misses the overall idea, which is whether or not it's actually that important, and whether or not you can circumvent it with simply having more stamina.

Note that it's much less relevant when you can't be crushed. Having two crushing blows in a 40% speed window + a special was much scarier than two normal hits + a special. But that's not what this question is about; this is about how much haste hurts you with parrying.

here's some rough analysis of how haste will affect your survival.In 240 seconds you have 160 GCDs and 40 cycles of 6 second mangle/x/x/FF. Of those, 3 can be parried. You will also normally have 100 mauls.

So in 240 seconds you have 120 parryable normal attacks (1/4 are faerie fire) and 100 mauls. Let's assume you're soft-capped for expertise, meaning you have 26 expertise. This means that you will have 8.5% parries overall, or 18.7 total parries in the fight.

If you have 1% haste, your attack speed drops from 2.4 to 99% of 2.4, or 2.37. That gives 101 mauls instead of 100, and now you have 221 parryable attacks. You're likely to get 18.78 parries.

How about 10% haste? Your attack speed is 10% faster than normal, or 2.18, and you are expected to have 110 mauls in the same time. Your total parries?

19.5.

So 10% haste means you will, on average, get parried .8 more times than you would have before if you have decent but not stellar expertise in a 4-minute fight.

Can that kill you? Yes, it can. It's not nearly as scary as it was before, but parries can certainly kill you on bosses that parry-haste. Thorim is about the only one I know of that actually has killed anyone recently, but it's theoretically possible.

Should it kill you? Well, even with most hard hitting bosses melee attacks aren't what is going to obliterate you. Thorim is one of the only cases I can think of where it can; most of his damage tends to be scary melee towards the end. Hodir has frozen blows, Vezax isn't really scary because of that at all, Gormok's scary because of impales + melee, Anub is scary because of freezing slash + swarm + melee. Now, if you get unlucky and get two very fast melee hits + a special, you can drop just like that. It's possible.

But I've not seen it happen to me yet.

Why is this the case?

Well, the main reason is the damage profile. Healers have to heal you like they did back in Brutallus days due to how much damage is coming in. They must keep you topped off if at all possible. Because of this, small bursts tend to be wiped out by healing. That's not always the case, but it often is.

Note that before Gormok's parryhaste flag was turned off, he absolutely could parry haste and he absolutely could wipe the floor with someone, especially if they got parried twice in a row. Three quick melee hits within a second is both huge amounts of damage and unexpected for healers to deal with.

Anyway, hope that helps. The long and short of it is that for a pure survival build you should max out expertise if possible and minimize haste if you haven't. If you have, of course, you can safely have as much haste as you want.

Ah, you're right. That makes my threat and this calculation off a bit. Not hugely, mind you; for 10% haste, that's 327.9 haste rating and a 2.18 attack speed and 110 attacks directly, instead of 111 attacks. Which makes haste even less important as a anti-survival tool.

This gets slightly complicated when you figure that haste is multiplicatively dealt with when it comes from multiple sources (such as windfury and bloodlust), but it's otherwise okay.

Do you think you could do a post about bear gems? I'm hearing all sorts of things like pure stam, stam/ agi, etc. With these yellow sockets in our t9 stuff that give agi bonuses I'm getting even more confused... :(

In regards to gemming, I thought I was almost clever when I put a Nightmare Tear in my T9.245 shoulders for use in both specs. The shoulder enchants aren't wildly useful for bears, so I used a cat chant. So I will potentially be able to have 3 tier pieces that can do double duty, along with chest and hands when that comes up.

The stam vs. stam/agi is a good question, since rawr recommends what seems to be some really low health totals even when set for Htoc25.

Anon1, thanks for the kind words. Not everything I say is perfectly accurate (witness: this post) but I try, and I also try to indicate when I'm wrong.

Anon2, gemming for bears in my worldview is very, very simple: stamina whenever reasonable. Agility on shared pieces when it makes sense. +10 all or agi/stam to activate the meta if you need. Yellow sockets should only be activated if you get +6 agi or more, and use a +10 all if you can. If you have more than one, think about going either agi/hit or stam/def.

I might post more about that later and give some examples in my gear.

Jheusse, that's probably not too bad; the shoulder enchant isn't great for both but it's also not such a big deal as far as enchants go (unlike the head or leg ones). I'd recommend doing it for the boots or chest instead, but it really depends on what your gear is; based on the upgrades I gained this week alone I've had to regem most things twice.

Par, you're welcome to email it to me at kalonjelen at gmail.com.

Ruben, the easiest way is to ask others who have logs. The next easiest way is to look at logs and see who does and doesn't parry haste; to do that, look at the time between normal attacks in the log, then look at the time after a parry occurs.

Hey have a stupid question that I should know but some things i have seen lately have been confusing. So by having some expertise on pvp gear is it possible to hit the level 80 dodge cap for expertise. Or does it not work like that? Oh and if so what is the cap for level 80?

dtc, I'm kinda confused what you mean. You can have expertise on pvp gear (or use it with pvp gear) but there's no specific dodge cap other than...uh...75% dodge. I mean, other players don't only dodge 6.5% of the time, right?

I believe the 80 dodge rate for normal mobs is fairly small, like 4-5%. But for players...it's what a player is.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.